The heckler landed on the stage in front of the four losing young man. He moaned softly as Madame Illusia approached him and prodded every part of his body with gnarled staff decorated with the shapes of serpents.
Stephan hauled the man so that he stood up straight, rigidly secured in position by a freezing spell from the old lady. The audience recoiled in horror as the man's hair whitened and fell in clumps from his head leaving him with a growing bald crown. The skin on his face became wrinkled and sagged, as did the covering on his arms, chest and legs. His balls hung lower within a thinning nest of grey pubic hair. Slowly, liver spots appeared on his shoulders as his skin retreated into his body, leaving his rib cage standing out prominently and his face becoming even more gaunt.
At some undefinable point, the man's body changed from being a living human being to a mouldering corpse. The stomach and lips became bloated with gas as the blood clotted underneath his skin. Strips of skin and muscle vanished from his head, first around his lips and eyes and then more generally, leaving a skull with gritted teeth and a rigid jaw atop a swollen and rotting body. More flesh disintegrated, until the man was left as little more than a skeleton stood immobilised on the stage.
A quick gesture from Madame Illusia and the freezing spell was broken sending the skeleton crashing to the floor to leave a jumbled pile of bones. The bones twisted together into a new shape - moving, growing and becoming smoother as the former skeleton became a large stony disc.
Stephan lifted the statue of Tom and placed its feet in the centre of the disc. With a look from Melanie, the stony disc's colour changed from white to grey as the soles of the statue's feet fused to their new pedestal.
It had taken the bodies of two men to create Melanie's latest toy. Slowly, she turned her gaze to the four young men standing upright besides her. The fun wasn't over yet, she thought.